Written by

Dan D’Ambrosio

Free Press Staff Writer

The new brand. / EMILY McMANAMY/FREE PRESS

Former brand.

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Move over red. Make way for green.

That’s one way to summarize the rebranding of NRG Systems in Hinesburg into Renewable NRG Systems. The bright red logo the company has sported for years is now a subdued green to better reflect the changes Renewable NRG has made to expand what it offers the wind industry, and to move into other forms of renewable energy.

Jan (Blittersdorf) Blomstrann, president and chief executive officer of Renewable NRG, rolled out the new identity last week, working with Mark and Lisa Sylvester of Interrobang Design Collaborative, Inc. in Richmond.

“It’s a big deal to go from bright red to green,” Blomstrann said in an interview. “It will take people time to adjust to it, but I’m not too worried, You can tell you’re still dealing with the same company.”

Lisa Sylvester explained the new logo retains the blocky look of the old logo, but adds a sweeping upward curve in one corner to “keep thing moving up.” The old logo featured a black swoosh that trended down as it met the edge of the red block containing “NRG Systems.”

“We retained the block, it’s very effective, but integrated curves to give it a dynamic quality and upward movement and growth,” Sylvester said.

Rebranding, Sylvester said, is about “growing in different directions” as Renewable NRG angles for new customers in an increasingly tough renewable energy business.

The new normal

“We’re 31 years old and have always been dedicated to wind energy within a tight niche of wind assessment,” she said. “For the last three or four years we’ve been offering products beyond that niche.”

The tight niche of wind assessment has served Renewable NRG well since David Blittersdorf, Blomstrann’s former husband, founded the company in 1982 in the couple’s home in Bristol. NRG Systems grew an at an average annual rate of 30 percent for 25 years, moving to Hinesburg for more space.

“It was amazing, it was great, really great,” Blomstrann said.

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NRG Systems was one of the few companies in the world doing wind assessments and developed a global reputation. Blomstrann became sole owner of the company in 2010. Blomstrann and Blittersdorf are divorced.

“People came to us,” Blomstrann said. “Now there’s more competition out there, and we’re working hard to get the sales we get. It’s different.”

In the past year or so, Renewable NRG was forced to cut about 40 employees, reducing the total workforce for the first time in the company’s history to about 78, Blomstrann said.

“As difficult and disappointing and heartbreaking as it was to cut those jobs it was necessary and did what it had to do,” Blomstrann said. “It allowed us to be a successful company at a lower level of revenue for this time.”

Jessica Godfrey, senior marketing specialist for Renewable NRG, put the company’s current revenue at around $25 million to $30 million annually.

A necessary step

The forces that led to Renewable NRG’s downsizing are large and global, Blomstrann said, beginning with the absence of a consistent long-term energy policy where renewables are concerned in the United States.

The only incentive the United States has for renewables — a production tax credit — is subject to approval by Congress, and while the tax credit was approved for this year, no one knows what will happen next year.

“At this point our sales are roughly 60 percent foreign, most sales are going out the door to other countries,” Godfrey said. “That used to be flip-flopped, but uncertainty in the United States with no long-term policy for wind means our customers are not looking to invest millions and millions of dollars in the United States in wind.”

Blomstrann said Renewable NRG has sold overseas since the late 1980s, but has seen domestic sales fall as a direct result of uncertainty in U.S. energy policy.

“That’s changed the ratio of domestic to foreign sales,” she said.

Unfortunately, the situation overseas changed for the worse last year as well, Blomstrann said, with China slowing down what had been an ambitious program of developing wind power.

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“China put in a ton of wind, but the infrastructure hadn’t caught up and a lot of turbines were not connected to the grid,” Blomstrann said. “That coincided with a five-year plan that came to maturity, and they just pulled the plug in 2012.”

India did the same thing.

“They decided to stop an incentive they had in place,” Blomstrann said. “Now it’s back again. We play a global game of figuring out where we should be positioned. It’s a complex business.”

Blomstrann stresses that NRG Systems’ rebranding was not a reaction to the tough times the companyexperienced.

“Rebranding was a necessary step in the company’s evolution to be clear to the world about who we are,” Blomstrann said. “Putting our best foot forward has been energizing in itself, but it’s not the reason we did it.”

Branching out

Renewable NRG has always been known for providing the wind assessment tools developers need to site turbines, but in the past several years, Blomstrann said the company has developed resource assessment tools for solar sites as well, putting it in competition with the Burlington-based Draker.

“We’re new to this and haven’t figured out what branch we’re going to be in but what we do is similar to what they do,” Blomstrann said of Draker.

Renewable NRG also offers wind turbine control sensors to help turbines turn into the wind and shut down depending on wind speed, and began selling condition monitoring systems that evaluate the health of the turbine’s drive train, helping to predict remaining useful life.

“The unique piece about wind is you have very large machines very high in the air, you can’t just walk up to one and see how it’s doing,” Blomstrann said. “It’s really important if you’re bringing in a crane anyway to do maintenance — an expensive proposition — to know how the rest of the turbines are doing and get maintenance at the same time.”

Finally, Renewable NRG has formed a partnership with a French company called Leosphere to further develop Lidar technology, which sends light beams in the air to measure wind speed.

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The Lidar technology is particularly attractive for complex terrain or remote sites, as opposed to erecting temporary towers and putting up anemometers, Blomstrann said.

“It’s customer choice, how they like to do their assessment and what they think will work for them,” she said.

A sustained effort

Chuck Maniscalco, vice president for strategic initiatives at Champlain College, believes Blomstrann is rebranding for all the right reasons. Maniscalco is a former president and chief executive officer of one of the divisions of PepsiCo.

“I like this a lot,” Maniscalco said of the rebranding. “It makes sense strategically and captures what they’re already doing, and she’s using it as a catalyst to drive awareness of what they have to offer. That’s all good.”

Neither is Blomstrann turning her back on what the company was before, Maniscalco said — a mistake that companies much larger than Renewable NRG have made in the past.

Maniscalco cites the example of Philip Morris, which rebranded itself as Altria to put distance between itself and tobacco. The company owns the Benson & Hedges, Marlboro and Chesterfield brands of cigarettes, among others.

“My read of the Philip Morris rebranding is it was a disaster,” Maniscalco said. “They spent a lot of money to develop, implement and support a new brand. By my assessment they got nothing for it. It was a wasted effort.”

While he likes what Blomstrann is doing with rebranding, Maniscalco cautions that the company must make a sustained effort to ensure the switch is successful.

“If all you do is change the logo and website from red to green that’s insufficient, it needs to be a much broader effort,” Maniscalco said.

Blomstrann has already done webinars regarding the rebranding with all of the company’s partners and key customers around the world, in addition to unveiling the new identity to staff and the public at large.

“We are now rolling it out in terms of a new website and everything else, starting to tell our story, who we are today and where we want to go in the future,” Blomstrann said.

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Preparing for the future

Lisa Sylvester of Interrobang Design Collaborative now sees green as the clear and obvious choice for the rebranding of Renewable NRG.

“I think if you asked me at the beginning if green was a good color for a renewables company I probably would have said no,” Sylvester said. “Do a Google search, and you’ll see a sea of green logos.”

But not among Renewable NRG’s competitors, she said, which include Thies Clima, Ammonit and Campbell Scientific, three of the companies Sylvester evaluated.

“What sealed the deal, when we looked at the logo in logo roundups it worked,” Sylvester said. “When we popped that green logo in it distinguished NRG from its competitors, which were all in the black, blue, orange or red range.”

Jan Blomstrann likes the green. And she likes what she believes rebranding will do for her company.

“We’re planning for much more gradual growth,” she said. “We are not growing right now. We’re pretty flat for the last couple of years. Again, if we’re not telling the world what we do that’s pretty basic. This is positioning us for future growth.”